On Sun, Jun 16, 2013 at 10:05:48AM +0100, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> You suggest that package maintainers get to suggest where donations go.
> There's two glaring problems there. First, it disregards all the great
> things people do to make Debian better that are _not_ about packaging
> at all.
Yeah, I agree with this concern as well. Everything which tries to
pay/tip Debian contributors and stays at the package level only is
doomed to fail, and bring with it some of the nasty consequences that
have been highlighted.
OTOH, I think it would be fine to have something at the package level to
pass on donations to our upstreams, as well as to ease donating to the
Debian project as a whole. See [1,2], already mentioned by Paul Wise in
his initial followup to this thread.
[1]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-www/2013/05/msg00025.html
[2]: http://upstream-metadata.debian.net/table/Donation
All the problems that have been highlighted are related to pay/tip
Debian contributors and the distorsions that institutionalizing that
process might introduce. But we already have at least 2 other kinds of
entities that actively seek donations (upstreams and Debian as a
project), and we do tolerate that. Making it easier for them to seek
donations doesn't seem problematic to me. On the contrary, there is an
active debate on how to sustain Free Software development while at the
same time keeping it away of companies and the need of turning a profit
(see for instance [3]).
[3]: https://lwn.net/Articles/511260/
Using Debian as a conduit to *ease* donation flows to FOSS that already
exist seems an useful thing to do to me. That is, after all, exactly
what [2] was meant for, maybe it can be improved and become more
successful adopting some of Manu's ideas.
Cheers.
--
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Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o
Former Debian Project Leader . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o .
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